History of Homeworlds
My main Homeworlds page
- (1987)
Andy Looney writes the short stories "Icehouse" and "The Children of Mars"
describing a game played with small pyramid pieces.
- Icehouse is described as a game played with little pyramids
but no turns and no board.
- Andy makes some prototype pieces
but isn't able to come up with satisfactory rules for an accompanying game.
- (1989)
John Cooper's rules for Icehouse are handed out to friends of John and the Looneys.
Icehouse largely matches the description of the fictional game.
- The same year, enthusiasts organize the first International Icehouse Tournament.
- John writes for the fan newsletter Hypothermia under the name Dr. Cool.
- (1996)
Hypothermia begins publishing rules for other games to play with Icehouse pieces.
- (1996)
Andy and Kristin Looney establish Looney Labs to publish Andy's card game Fluxx.
- As Andy says in Hypothermia 13 in 1996,
the Icehouse pyramids were not financially feasible at this time.
The success of Fluxx gives Looney Labs more freedom to develop the pyramids.
- (1998)
John Cooper invents the new game "IceTraders" for the Icehouse pieces.
- John said in conversation that IceTraders grew out of a desire to make
a game about pieces co-equally occupying clusters
rather than single pieces occupying traditional spaces or squares.
During development, the working name for IceTraders was "Clusterf***."
- (1999)
Pieces and rules for IceTraders are distributed as part of
Icehouse: The Martian Chess Set.
- (2000)
The Martian Chess Set wins the Origins Award for best abstract board game.
- (2000-2011)
Tournaments for IceTraders and Homeworlds are included in the Big Experiments at Origins.
- (2001)
John Cooper modifies the rules of IceTraders, and the result is named "Homeworlds."
-
Like IceTraders, Homeworlds was designed as a hybrid abstract and
social deduction game best for four players.
- (2002)
The rules of Homeworlds are published for the first time
in the booklet Playing with Pyramids.
- (2004)
With Andy's input, John agrees that the two-player experience is improved by
reducing the bank to three trios of each color.
The modified game is called "Binary Homeworlds."
- (2004)
The first Binary Homeworlds tournament is part of Big Experiment #5.
- (2005)
Aaron Dalton develops the website Super Duper Games (SDG)
for playing board games by correspondence.
- SDG includes the first online version of Homeworlds.
- (2006-present) Looney Labs experiments with ways to package and market Icehouse pieces.
- Homeworlds is featured in
- the 3House booklet (2007),
- the Pyramid Primer booklet (2012),
- the Pyramid Arcade set (2016),
- and the standalone Homeworlds boxed set of the Pyramid Quartet (2020).
- (2015)
Draws by simultaneous elimination are informally added to the rules of Homeworlds.
- (2015)
Andy begins awarding physical medals to people who beat him at Homeworlds.
- (2017)
Babamots begins running The Great Homeworlds Tournament.
- (2020)
"thelast19digitsofpi" develops the website Homeworlds Live.
- This is the first online version of Homeworlds designed for real-time play.
- (2022)
The website Board Game Arena publishes a Homeworlds implementation
supporting both correspondence and live play.
Sources and more reading
The "early" history (until about 2016) of the Looney Pyramids
and Homeworlds are discussed in these Looney Labs-related sources
-
Histories of the pyramids that are not focused on Homeworlds
-
Wunderland blog archive
is entertaining reading all around,
especially if you use an Internet archive to see the broken external links.
Here are some particular posts about Homeworlds:
-
Hypothermia archives
(IceTraders never appeared in Hypothermia,
but Homeworlds is mentioned in issue 16)
- Historical rules online
(the oldest links are broken,
but you can use Internet archives to view historical versions)
-
Index of Big Experiments,
including tournaments for IceTraders and Homeworlds
-
Andy's page about Homeworlds,
which includes brief descriptions of the tournaments from 2004 to 2011.
-
Andy and John weigh in on draws